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Cabbage with Cream
Clean two cabbages and boil until soft, then remove them from the water and drain, pressing well until dry. Chop up fine and place them in a stewpan in which an ounce of butter had been melted, add pepper and salt to taste. Place the whole over the fire for two or three minutes, stirring frequently. When quite hot sprinkle a handful of flour over, adding gradually half a pint of milk or cream. Mix together thoroughly, and serve.
Boiled Pickled Red Cabbage with Oysters Place the pickled cabbage in a bowl of boiling water and soak for ten to twelve minutes. Then remove and drain it dry, rubbing well with a cloth, put it into a saucepan with a small quantity of dripping and stock and sprinkle over a little coarse black pepper and boil it until done, when place it in a circle around a dish, filling in the center with stewed oysters, and serve.
Two recipes have run together here: a plain creamed cabbage, and a fragment for pickled red cabbage ringed around stewed oysters. Both are workable, but the boiling times belong to an era that liked its vegetables very soft.
- The hinge: press it dryCabbage holds an astonishing amount of water, and this dish has no thickening beyond a handful of flour. Drain in a colander, then press hard in a clean towel or against the sides of a sieve — wet cabbage will thin the cream into a grey puddle.
- "Boil until soft"For two heads of green or Savoy cabbage cut in wedges, 8 to 12 minutes in well-salted water is enough for tender; the original asks only for "soft", which in this period means considerably longer and fully collapsed. Cook to your own preference, but chop after draining, not before, or you will lose the leaves through the colander.
- QuantitiesTwo cabbages means roughly 4 lb as sold; half a pint is one cup of milk or cream. A "handful of flour" is about 2 to 3 tablespoons — enough to coat the cabbage and bind the cream, not to make a sauce.
- Order of operationsThe flour goes onto hot buttered cabbage and is cooked briefly before the liquid, which is a roux made in place. Add the milk in stages and stir, or the flour will seize into lumps around the shreds.
- An ounce of butter is thinThat is 2 tablespoons for 4 lb of cabbage. Doubling it costs nothing and improves the result considerably; a grating of nutmeg is common in cream sauces of the period and is not out of keeping.
- Dripping, in the second recipeBeef or bacon dripping, saved from roasting. Bacon fat is the closest thing most kitchens have; butter works but loses the savour the dish is built on.
- The oystersStewed oysters need about two minutes in their own liquor with a little cream — just until the edges ruffle. Anything approaching the long boil the red cabbage gets will make them rubbery, so cook them last and separately.
- Pickled red cabbageThe soaking and rubbing dry presumably serve to soften the cabbage and draw out sharp vinegar from a heavily pickled jar. Modern jarred red cabbage is milder and sweeter; taste it first and shorten or skip the soak.
- YieldThe creamed cabbage serves six to eight as a side dish.
Oscar Tschirky, the Waldorf's maître d'hôtel and the "Oscar" of the title, published his cookbook in 1896, and it reads less like restaurant cooking than a compendium of what a well-off American household of the 1890s might want on the table — which is why a homely creamed cabbage sits in it at all. The pairing of red cabbage with oysters is a good marker of the period: oysters were still cheap and superabundant in New York, sold from street barrows and folded into dishes where a later cook would use nothing at all. The two recipes run together without a proper break, though there is nothing to show whether that came from the original printing or from a later transcription; it is not an instruction to combine them.